There’s no denying that the Asus Padfone is a clever design. Not only does the system allow you to insert the smartphone base unit into a tablet dock with an extended battery, but roll in the trademark Asus Transformer keyboard accessory and you’ve also got yourself an Android netbook. Top it all off with the wild Bluetooth headset/stylus combination, and you’ve got a veritable Swiss Army Knife of mobile computing utility.

Now, at long last, Asus has finally started taking pre-orders for the Padfone — at least in Taiwan. Converted to U.S. currency, the smartphone itself is retailing for about $610. That’s roughly $130 less than the iPhone 4S sells for.

Tack on the accessories that actually make the Padfone interesting, and the price predictably climbs a bit. The tablet and stylus pack adds another $240, while the full kit — phone, stylus, tablet dock, and keyboard — will cost you just shy of $1,000. Whether that amount of money is enough to get folks to buy the Padfone combo instead of, say, another high-end Android phone and a Transformer Prime, remains to be seen. While that would mean managing data on two different devices, you’d be getting two additional processor cores (or is it three?) to play around with.

The Padfone certainly isn’t a bad deal if you consider what you’d be spending on three separate devices, but it’s not the kind of bargain the Asus MeMo is rumored to be. Then again, Asus hasn’t started taking pre-orders for the MeMo yet, so there’s no telling whether or not they’ll actually bring it to market at the $250 price tag they said they would.